


hey love, we'll get away with it

by waferkya



Category: Mayans M.C. (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, First Meetings, M/M, Military Backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-13 20:43:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16479428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waferkya/pseuds/waferkya
Summary: Seven knocks, and it takes Coco a moment to remember it’s not a code, and he doesn’t have to wait for the safeword, because he’s back to civilization now and that’s not how it works around here.





	hey love, we'll get away with it

Seven knocks at the door. Seven knocks, bare knuckles rapping on solid wood seven times, bones hidden by skin hitting a thin, chipping layer of paint - what color was it again? Seven knocks, and it takes Coco a moment to remember it’s not a code, and he doesn’t have to wait for the safeword, because he’s back to civilization now and that’s not how it works around here. He lights a cigarette and touches the gun tucked at the front of his jeans for comfort. The door’s color is eggshell, of course, he knew this. It’s his own goddamn front door. He pulls it open just enough to make sure whoever came knocking can see the gun. Yeah, it’s loaded. Yeah, he won’t hesitate to use it.

On his doorstep, there’s a kid. Big and built like a wardrobe, yes, but a kid nonetheless: smooth cheeks and big brown eyes and the downturned shoulders of someone who’d rather run from a fistfight than cause it. Coco knows for a fact that if this kid tries to sell him Girl Scout Cookies, he’ll buy six boxes. Because of those eyes.

“Yeah?” he says instead, flinching at the rough sound of his own voice. The kid looks definitely lost, confused like maybe he got the wrong house, except it’s kind of hard to walk up to Coco’s door by mistake: you have to cross the fence, ignore the chickens, walk forty feet through dirt and knee-high thorny weeds.

The kid’s eyes drop to the gun, then quickly come back up. Not a complete idiot. He might be dangerous, then. It’s always the ones that don’t look like it that get you. Coco straightens his spine and takes just half a step back. The kid looks strong but muscles don’t stop bullets.

“I’m looking for Angel,” the kid finally says, with an interrogative quality to it. This doesn’t help Coco relax much. Why is he looking for Angel? What does he want? And does he expect Coco to invite him in, just like that, no introductions, no explanation? Fuck that. Angel is in the other room, half naked, breathless and damp with sweat. No way Coco’s gonna let anyone else see him like that.

But then, Angel shouts, “It’s my brother,” and Angel’s brother says, “I’m EZ,” and oh, fuck, yeah, of course, Coco knows EZ. The baby brother who wants a gun. He looks at him and now that he’s searching for it, he can kind of see the resemblance with Angel, too. The eyes and the nose and the shape of the mouth, but nothing else. EZ is the kind of athletic that comes from a place of sports instead of raw violence and survival. Coco likes him right away, and he wants to protect that doe-eyed look, and suddenly he regrets giving Angel the gun.

He’s gonna do something - not sure what yet - but then Angel’s hand is at the small of his back, a warm weight that coils Coco’s insides even tighter. Angel comes up to the door and their shoulders brush against one another: it takes all of Coco’s considerable willpower to not close his eyes and simply fucking relish in the closeness.

“This is Coco,” Angel tells EZ, because he knows Coco’s good for shit and he still hasn’t adjusted to the fact that the world is not his platoon anymore.

“Sorry about your mom,” Coco says through his teeth, trying his best to sound sympathetic. Angel looks at him kind of surprised: he didn’t expect Coco to put two and two together and actually be a decent human being about it. But the corner of his mouth is turning up, like maybe he’s a little pleased too, and Coco chews his bottom lip, takes a drag off the cigarette.

EZ nods, all sad and somber-like, and turns around. Angel’s hand makes another quick appearance pressing against Coco’s hip, and it’s a way of saying he’ll be right back. Coco doesn’t talk again, folding back into the house. He doesn’t miss how EZ keeps turning back to look, curious and baffled, and he prays to God those goddamn sharp eyes haven’t picked up on the way Coco stared at Angel’s ass for a second.

*

The issue with Coco is anxiety; always has been. After this last tour, the Corps even tried to give it a proper name, something that sounded scientific and very much like a death sentence if anyone in Santo Padre ever ended up hearing it. Everyone already calls him Coco Loco, no need to make it official, thank you very much; so the moment he felt the label coming, Coco shut down, refused to answer the shrink’s questions with any degree of detail, and simply said, “I’m fine,” enough times that they eventually grew tired and excused him from the rest of his mandatory counseling hours.

He’s always been this way, for as long as he can remember. His coping mechanism is smoking and booze, so childhood was particularly tough. When he was eight or ten years old, still way too young to convince anyone to buy him beer or frajos, he used to bite his nails, chew on his fingertips until his teeth were pulling skin and drawing blood. It was fucking obnoxious, that’s what it was: if he wasn’t careful he would leave pale red smears on everything he touched, and Coco is never, ever careful. At least, not about himself. Celia used to smack him so hard he felt his head pop off his neck more than once. It never did come off, though, so maybe it was all just a bad dream.

It was almost a relief, the first time the cashier at the shop was either too dumb or too tired to care, and let Coco walk out with a six pack in each hand without batting an eye.

Overseas, cigarettes were everywhere, all the time. They were the cheapest, and the best, tasties shit he’s ever smoked. Civilian tobacco doesn’t compare to the pure tar and concrete that soldiers happily shove down their lungs in the desert. But the lack of booze, that’s one of the downsides of the Corps, and one reason why Coco was hesitant to go back a third time.

The other reason is tall, dark and broody; slim at the waist, lean but heavy-footed; shoulders wide enough to carry the weight of the world; hands big enough that the span of his thumb and index finger can wrap around a man’s windpipe and choke; the other reason why Coco came this close to bailing and completely fucking up his life, the main reason, _the only reason_ has sinful lips and those kind fucking eyes that drive him up the wall every time they stop on him.

They met at the grocery store, out of all the terrible places in the world. It went like this:

Coco is considering his options for the night. He’s locked it down to three possible poisons, the classics: it’s either tequila, or rum, or straight gin. Tequila won’t give him an hangover but it’ll get him so horny he won’t sleep; a third of a bottle of rum will send him straight into the world of the dead, but then he’ll hate himself for a week; gin is a fair compromise, but it won’t go too well with the brick of weed Coco is planning to smoke tonight. It’s a tough choice to make, and it’s taking him a very long time to decide, but then again, he’s leaving for Iraq in five days; he doesn’t have much else to do.

His slow decision-making process doesn’t sit too well with someone.

“Oye, tìo, te has quedado dormido? Vàmonos, por favor,” a deep voice that sounds like it’s made of gravel says from behind him. Coco immediately bristles, who the fuck dares to disrespect him like this in his town, and he turns on his heel ready to throw a punch without even looking (again: he’s leaving in five days; he’d much rather die bloody on American soil rather than lost somewhere in the sandy crack of Satan’s ass), except the man in front of him is sporting the most astonishing fucking pout on the face of the Earth, and Coco was not ready for that. This man is Angel Goddamn Reyes, of course, except Coco doesn’t know it yet.

Coco’s breath catches low in his throat, he loses momentum. He can feel himself deflate.

“Yeah, sorry, I zoned out,” he says, his brain shutting down. He takes a random bottle off the shelf and turns around, head bowed, ready to make a beeline for the cash register. But Angel catches him by the elbow, stops him right in his tracks. To this day, Coco doesn’t know exactly how he resisted the urge to bash Angel’s head in with the bottle and flee the scene. He usually hates being grabbed or shoved or touched in any way. This is one of the many times where Coco makes an exception for Angel.

“Don’t,” Angel tells him at the shop, eyeing the bottle of shitty whiskey Coco picked without even looking. “That shit’s gonna burn a hole in your stomach.”

Without being asked, Angel takes the whiskey and hands Coco the tequila he was eyeing earlier. Coco is frozen still, trapped by the stupidly attractive magnetism of this rude motherfucker. Angel is chewing gum, for fuck’s sake. It shouldn’t be pretty, but it is.

Coco is staring at his mouth when he says, “Thanks.”

Angel shrugs with one shoulder. “Thank you, for you service,” he replies, his mouth curling up at the corners, and he manages to sound only slightly sarcastic. Coco is confused for a second; Angel juts his chin out, pointing somewhere in the direction of Coco’s chest, and Coco remembers he’s been toying with his dog tags: they must’ve fallen out of his shirt.

He shakes his head, doesn’t want to think about it. But Angel isn’t about to let him go. “You good?”

Coco considers this. He considers the shape of Angel’s biceps, clearly visible where the long-sleeved shirt adheres to them perfectly. He considers the careful, concerned tilt of Angel’s mouth, and the softness in his eyes. He considers the fact that Angel doesn’t appear to be armed, while his usual Glock is tucked safely at the back of Coco’s jeans. He considers the calluses he felt on Angel’s fingers, he considers how fucking big his hands are.

Eventually, he finds himself looking up and asking: “Do you smoke?”

This is how they end up holed in at Coco’s house for the rest of his leave. Except for a couple of shifts at his father’s shop, and one family dinner he really can’t turn down, Angel stays, and never seems to want to leave. Coco never asks him to.

It’s five days, they pass by so so fast and infinitely slow at the same time. Suddenly Coco is leaving to bring death and democracy to the Middle East, and he never even tries to address the liquid heat that pools in the pit of his stomach when he thinks of Angel. He leaves, and to some extent being back in combat is good. He feels good with a big gun strapped across his chest, he feels good wrapped head to toe in MARPAT, he feels good carrying a backpack that’s heavier than him, he feels good driving through enemy territory. Anxiety shuts the fuck up when all you’ve gotta do is follow orders. And something feral, blood-thirsty and really fucking enthralling comes back to life, when the orders are to lay down in the sand and shoot and kill.

He has friends in the Corps. He’s in with good people, they’re brothers. They tease him endlessly for the haircut he’s donning. “Didn’t know you had it in you to be so stylish, CC.” “Your mother picked it, right? You usually have zero taste.” “You’ve gotta give up your barber’s name, brah.”

Coco smiles and doesn’t tell anyone that on his last night in Santo Padre, Angel took a look at the regulation haircut the Corps gave Coco on his previous tours, and laughed so hard that he started to cry. Coco doesn’t tell anyone that Angel made him sit on the edge of the bathtub, and then stood, bracketed by Coco’s legs, as he ran a wet comb through his hair. Coco doesn’t tell anyone that, while he gently cut his hair, Angel talked, his voice smoky and even, about his mother teaching him and his brother how to cut hair; he talked about Ezekiel almost hacking off Angel’s ear the first time he used the electric razor; he told stories from his childhood, and went on to talk of just about everything in the world, while Coco slowly came undone under his touch. Nobody needs to know that Coco still jacks off to the memory of Angel’s fingers in his hair, of the soft buzz of the razor so close to his scalp.

He knows he’ll die in the theater, this time. It’s a feeling deep in his gut, a certainty that comes from resignation: having met Angel must have its price, and Coco is more than ready to pay it with his life. Instead, he doesn’t die. Some of his friends do. He gets a bullet to the hip, and another three confirmed kills before he’s forced to get medevac’d. From there, it’s a whirlwind of military hospitals and good drugs for the pain and a quick stretch of PT. They assign him to a better shrink this time: she’s quiet as fuck, doesn’t ask him anything ever, and it gets under his skin enough that, on the last session, after weeks of simply sitting in silence staring at the wall, Coco ends up crying for five minutes, like, full-on sobbing and shit. It’s embarrassing. When he’s calmed the fuck down, the shrink tells him he’s been very, very good. It shouldn’t be so comforting, but it is.

He hasn’t written home in months. He comes back to Santo Padre and there’s nobody to pick him up, which is exactly what he wanted: he doesn’t want to see Celia, couldn’t deal with Leticia. He gets home, gets a scalding hot shower where he tries not to think about Angel in this very same bathroom, then _fails spectacularly_ at not thinking about Angel, so he jerks off, quick and effective, and then he drops on the bed and sleeps for two days.

He wakes up hungry and craving nicotine. He walks into town. He inhales a burger and fries at the first diner he sees. He’s sitting in the window, with a clear view of the door, gun hidden by the folds of his shirt. The waitress is pretty and makes good coffee. Coco almost jumps out of his seat when he hears a distant rumble, roaring like an invasion. He forces himself to get a grip: it’s just the local biker gang passing by a couple of streets over, and through the window he watches as the fuckers roar by in full gear. They’re way too far, so he has no idea that Angel is with them; there is no cosmic shift, no chill in his bones, no sign from the universe.

From another shop he gets cigarettes and a case of beer, and then, on his way back, he notices a sign he’d never paid any attention to before in his life. Carnicería Reyes. His heart shoots up straight to his throat and really, really wants to come out. Coco is pushing the glass door open before he even knows what he’s doing.

Angel’s mother smiles at him from behind the counter. “Hi, welcome,” she says. Coco must be staring at her with the stupidest expression in the world, but her smile doesn’t falter and she whispers, like she’s having fun, “Prefieres hablar español?”

Finally, Coco’s tongue unglues itself from the roof of his mouth. “No, es… es lo mismo, thank you.”

“Alright. Were you looking for something in particular, honey?”

Coco stares at the bountiful display of meat and for a second he sees the desert and bombs exploding all over and people crying for medics. He shakes his head, scratches the side of his face. “Anything but a burger. Maybe something easy to cook? I’m not very good.”

“Oh, I have the perfect thing. These calf bites,” Angel’s mother says, pulling a plastic plate out of the counter. “You just boil a couple of potatoes, throw out the water, in the same pot you heat up a little oil and garlic, put the potatoes back in with the meat, let it simmer for 45 minutes and you have the best stew in the world. Perfect comfort food.”

Coco is surprised to find himself smiling. “Sounds perfect. Gracias.”

She beams back at him, and goes to wrap the meat for him. As he waits, Coco lets his eyes wander. The shop is tiny, but tidy and luminous. It’s cared for. On every wall there’s pictures and news clippings on display. This is a family business, the memories go back for generations. And behind the counter, Coco finds what he was looking for: a picture of Angel’s family, it can’t be more than a couple of years old. Angel stands tall and broad and handsome next to his mother, an arm around her shoulders. Then there’s his father, and finally a sweet-looking kid with the same sharp, sweet look in his eyes; the two sons are almost keeping watch on their parents.

Angel’s mother catches him looking and smiles. Coco looks down, embarrassed; he pulls out a few bills - way too much cash - and puts them on the counter.

“You have a beautiful family,” he says, quick and under his breath, without thinking that it might sound like some sort of threat. He leaves without taking his meat.

Two days later, Coco is playing videogames on the couch, a joint hanging off his lips, bottle of tequila between his legs. He’s hyperfocused on the game, trying to catch the best dragon that ever existed and it’s exactly as tough as he’d expected, but this doesn’t mean he’s a fucking moron. He hears the bike when it’s still at least five blocks out. He pauses the game, and fishes the gun out of the sofa cushions.

His bedroom window faces the street. Coco plasters himself to the wall and looks through the blinders. Fuck, the biker is pulling straight into his courtyard. The cut on his back reads Mayans MC, there’s a gun at his hip and his posture doesn’t really inspire much hope. Coco cocks the gun.

Best case scenario, it’s Losa: Coco has heard that the President of the MC is a former Marine as well. Coco’s first tour was actually Losa’s last. Losa would be here to recruit him. Again, Coco is not a moron. He knows he’s skilled with guns, and he knows even better that word about his kind of talent doesn’t take long to spread. If it’s Losa, he needs to find a good, compelling reason to turn him down, and he needs to find it fast.

Worst case scenario, it’s someone whose mother or father or sister Coco has offended at some point in his life. This someone must’ve heard he’s back from duty, and is now looking for revenge. It wouldn’t be the first time. Or even the fifth.

“Christ, I need to reevaluate my life,” Coco mumbles to himself as he walks up to the door. He can hear steps on the opposite side. The gun is ready.

Three knocks, without any kind of rhythm. Something stirs inside Coco; later, he’ll realize that it’s because he’s heard Angel’s tone-deaf knocking before. Right now, though, he’s too wound up and worried about dying in the next three minutes to really make the connection.

“Who is it?” he barks.

“Room service,” comes the nonsensical response. Coco chews his bottom lip and thinks, fuck it. He opens the door. He takes in the steel-toe boots, the black jeans frayed at the knees, the trim waist, and that’s where his eyes are getting bigger and rounder, because fuck, he’d know the shape of that chest anywhere, and of course the shoulders even half-hidden under the leather cut, and oh, look, his face, Angel’s face, it’s always exactly the same.

“Oh,” Coco says, breathing out for the first time since he got shot in the desert.

“Yeah, _oh_ ,” Angel says, rolling his eyes. He shoulders his way in, steals a critical look at the gun still ready in Coco’s hand. “You plannin’ on using that on me?”

Coco stays frozen on the doorstep for another moment. Then his face cracks into a smile, he puts the safety on, and Angel grins back at him, holding up a plastic bag. It’s the meat Coco left at the shop: Angel’s mother cooked it for him.

“I’m hurt you didn’t call when you got back, carnal,” Angel says, and he’s just half-joking. But he doesn’t ask more, and Coco is grateful to dig his grave and lay in it: he tells Angel to stay for dinner, and then, again, never asks him to leave.

*

The day his mother dies bloody and senselessly on the floor of her own shop, Angel is with Coco. It’s not unusual: when he’s not on club business, he spends all his time with Coco. So, Ezekiel calls, and tells him, and Angel starts pacing Coco’s living room. He looks shell-shocked, pale and wide-eyed. He stands very still for a moment, and then he punches the wall. Coco comes up to stop him: he doesn’t give a fuck about the wall, but Angel’s hand is covered with blood and it looks like he’s about to shatter his knuckles. When Angel tells him what happened, Coco’s throat closes around something that tastes like sorrow.

That night, Angel kisses him first.

*

Coco is sprawled on the armchair and dozing off when he hears the door open and then shut again. Sitting up and reaching for the gun on the coffee table is an instinct he can’t keep in check; Angel knows him, though, better than anyone, and he’s already saying, “My brother says bye.”

It’s a gentleway to tranq Coco without making him feel like an idiot for his paranoia. By the time Angel walks into the room, Coco is back to chill and collected. He finds an open beer can on the floor and takes a long swig.

“He didn’t like me much,” Coco says, after thinking about it for a second. Angel sits down on the sofa, looking slightly baffled that Coco picked the armchair. He takes off the stupid fucking trucker hat he’s wearing and runs a hand through his flattened hair.

“Nobody does,” he jokes, which never fails to bring a smile to Coco’s face.

“He’s smarter than you.”

Angel is silent for a moment, fiddling with the hat. “Yeah, he is,” he rasps eventually, and Coco wonders how big and sensitive a nerve he just hit. Angel dispels the tension throwing the hat at Coco, who in turn catches it mid-air. Angel has the audacity to look surprised. He smiles, open and handsome. “Nice catch.”

“You give him the gun?”

“He vuelto con las manos vacías, no?” Angel rubs his hands together, avoiding Coco’s eyes. “I don’t know, I think I fucked up. I’ve never seen him like this.”

Coco leans in, wanting to get closer to Angel’s face, to his problems. He licks his lips before speaking, and he misses how Angel does not miss that.

“He looked… preoccupied,” Coco says, even if it’s not true: Ezekiel looked fucking terrified and haunted. But Coco doesn’t think that Angel needs to hear that. “But he won’t do anything stupid, c’mon, he’s smart.”

“He wants to find our mom’s killer. He thinks he’s onto something… he’s obsessed, you have no idea. Now, if he was stupid… yeah, I’d be worried,” Angel laughs, but there’s no joy in it. “But a smart kid with a mission? I’m fucking terrified, cariño. And I put a gun in his hand.”

Angel looks lost and scared, and Coco wants to punch Ezekiel’s face for five weeks straight. Instead, he pulls off the armchair and walks up to the sofa. Angel sits up and makes room for him, and Coco goes to his knees between Angel’s legs. He puts his hands around Angel’s head, staring straight up into his eyes, because this is important. This, right here, is everything. Angel’s hands immediately wrap around his wrists, not to push him away, but to hold him, to tell him: stay exactly like this, yeah: this is everything.

“We’ll keep an eye on him,” Coco promises, and he feels immensely lighter when Angel’s eyes flutter closed. Coco’s thumb gently smoothes the lines of tension around Angel’s mouth. “You know, surveillance is kind of my specialty.”

Angel smiles a little. “I thought weapons were your specialty.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Coco says, without heat, but he does move as if to pull away. In response, Angel leans in and catches Coco’s mouth with his. The kiss is unusually tentative and slow, soft like something Coco would expect from a woman. He doesn’t mind. He rolls his weight back to the front of his knees, and his hands grab Angel’s beard, the back of his neck, trying a better angle.

They pull apart with a sigh.

“Sorry about all the family drama,” Angel whispers right against Coco’s lips, eyes hooded and hands roaming across his back.

“It’s okay. ‘s all good,” Coco mumbles. “You look good when you’re worried.”

He feels Angel’s mouth curl up in a grin, just moments before Angel’s hands hook around his armpits and pull him up, until Coco’s straddling him on the couch. Right. Back to where they were before baby brother dropped by.  


**Author's Note:**

> This show is such a wonderful dirty pleasure. I love these dumb boys; could I make it anymore obvious?


End file.
